Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to a method and an apparatus for controlling the operation of a plurality of processor cores within a computing system, and more particularly, to a method for controlling the operating frequencies and turning on and off power to processor cores within a computing system, and an apparatus thereof.
Description of the Related Art
As computation complexity has increased, it has become increasingly prevalent to employ multiple processors to execute different portions of one or more computer programs in parallel on different processors. To this end, the microprocessors currently in use normally integrate multiple processing cores in contrast to several years ago, when single core microprocessors were the rule.
While the advantage of multi-core processing is well known, efficient management of the multi-core is sometimes a very complicated job. The challenge lies in determining how many cores should be turned on to exploit the proper degree of parallelism, and under what clock frequency the turned-on cores should operate so that fewer computation resources are wasted. The problem is further complicated because the operating constraints (e.g. power budget and workload) may keep changing. Thus, it is desirable to devise a robust and efficient approach for managing the operation of the multi-core.